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terrupted and festooned instead of serrated, and other sexual and 

 nuptial characters reside in the presence of lobes bordering the toes 

 and of a beautiful pale blue band with black bais on the lower part 

 of the tail ; the belly is orange or vermilion red in the middle, with 

 round black spots. 



The third, and smallest species, hardly exceeding three inches in 

 length, the Palmated Newt {M. pahnata), is very near the preceding, 

 but the male m nuptial attire is easily distinguished by the sub- 

 quadrangular shape of the body, each side limited above by a low 

 dermal fold, by the feebly developed dorsal crest with entire edge, by 

 the presence of a filament at the abruptly truncate extremity of the 

 tail, and by the black web between the toes, the foot being com- 

 parable to a duck's, whilst that of the Common Newt resembles a 

 coot's. The belly, in both sexes, is paler than usual in the 

 Common Newt, yellow or pale orange in the middle, never'red, and 

 the black spots are smaller, or even absent. . 



Although the males of these two Newts are so strikingly different in 

 their water costume, the females at all times, and the males also when 

 the breeding season is over, are not so easy to distinguish froni the 

 common species, and it requires a close examination, in which the 

 skull may have to be resorted to, before one can be quite certain of 

 the determination ; this close examination will usually reveal in the 

 female a mere rudivnent of the filament at the end of the tail, 

 passed on in a reduced form from the other sex like so many secondary 

 sexual characters in the animal kingdom. There is, however, a far 

 safer criterion to resort to in order never to make a mistake, what- 

 ever the sex or state of the specimen, and which is very striking in 

 fresh examples: whereas the throat of the Common Newt is always of 

 an opaque white or yellow, very rarely without black spots or dots, 

 that of the Paln:(ated Newt is absolutely devoid of pigment, flesh- 

 coloured and immaculate. I have examined hundreds, perhaps 

 thousands, of specimens without ever finding an exception to this 

 character, until last spring, when, catching Palmated Newts at 

 Han-sur-Lesse, in Belgium, in company with my friend M. G. F. de 

 Witte, I was greatly surprised at finding one, a male, with the 

 throat dotted over with black specks. The specimen is now pre- 

 served in the Natural History Museum, and I doubt whether 

 another such will soon be found again. This shows that hardly 

 any single character is ever absolutely constant ; exceptions will 

 turn up whenever very large numbers of specimens are carefully 

 examined and that is why extensive series are required in order to 

 properly understand specific chai'acters, or, rather, combinations of 

 characters, any single one of which may fail. All zoologists know 

 this — the days of the Noah's Ark collection of " species " are over — 

 and yet I am often surprised and shocked when reading systematic 

 descriptions or diagnoses, to find how individual variation is over- 

 looked or deliberately ignored, with the object evidently of 

 emphasising distinctions. 



